What makes a great villain?

Now what does make a great villain? Wormholes, a Breakthrough, Doomsday being nigh .. ah! - how about an explanation on my blog .. please welcome the author with the mostest: Mr Stephen Tremp ...

... who, in this the first of his trilogy, Breakthrough, entices us with movie hurtling scenes, racy locations, snow storms, physics .. and wormholes (my best!) .. please sit back and enjoy the words of Stephen Tremp as my first guest ever to post here:

Stephen Tremp's book: Breakthrough - The Adventures of Chase Manhattan

Some villains are obvious from the start. In old Westerns, the bad guy wore the black hat, the good guy the white hat. Darth Vader was dressed entirely in black. Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker wore white. However, villains today are not necessarily so cut and dry. They do not even need to be people. Aliens from other planets make great villains. So do animals such as Jaws.

Jaws: Theatrical release poster (Steven Spielberg film)

Villains can take the form of concepts and ideologies such as social injustices, racism, or human trafficking. Villains can be drugs. They can be greed and lust for power, or just plain ignorance of another’s differences and making them scapegoats as in Schindler’s List.

Don’t forget about the setting, which itself can be a really nasty evil villain. I bought the movie "1408" because this is such a story. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend renting it.

1408 Theatrical Release poster of the film – based on a Stephen King short story


Generally, I’ve been taught that the villain is the obstacle that stands in the way of the protagonist. The good guy is introduced first, then the villain enters a few chapters later and rains on the protagonist’s parade or threatens the world or a small sliver of it.

However, sometimes villains are unmasked to the reader from the start. I prefer to begin a story with the bad guy. Example: In the Columbo television series the villain is first introduced to the audience performing his murderous acts. There is no Whodunit as we already know who done it. It’s just a matter of the sleuth performing detective work and solving the crime.

Other times the author waits until the end of the story to reveal the killer. Example: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes or Scooby Doo (I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids).

Every episode of the original Scooby-Doo format contains a penultimate scene in which the kids unmask the ghost-of-the-week to reveal a real person in a costume. FromScooby-Doo, Where Are You! season two, episode one ("Nowhere To Hyde", September 12, 1970).


Villains needn’t be malicious or even hold anything against the protagonist. An antagonist must simply impede a story’s action towards the goal: Villain Writing Lessons from Lord Vader. Of course, if they meet and hate each other’s guts, that’s better. Find the balance. Get inside their head. Make them believable, but one who takes risks most would not ordinarily do.

Villains need a reason to act and react the way that they do. His or her actions can introduce the conflict that drives the story forward. It is then up to the antagonist to put an end to the madness and stop the villain, possibly even killing him.

More and more, audiences are demanding villains past are explained. They want to know why they are they way they are. Example: The new Freddy Krueger movie will go into far more detail of how Freddy came to be Freddy because the first movie did not go into much detail other than the mother explaining the story to her daughter.

Freddy Krueger – a ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ character

Humanizing is vital to developing a villain. Each of your characters should think like a human (even if they’re not), and react to events in very human ways, regardless how fantastical or outlandish events become. Character flaws go along with humanization. Both protagonist and antagonist need to have faults. Usually, the good guy overcomes and conquers as I explain in the post The Straight from Hel: Character Arc while the bad guy has damning faults that ultimately lead to his demise. Example: Greed or madness.

Important: Developing a great villain does not necessarily mean he only has to make life dangerous for the good guy. Make life dangerous for him, too. Who are the antagonist’s antagonists besides the good guy? You can really make things difficult for the villain as the story progresses then draws to a close. His world is closing in around him. Detectives, family and friends of victims, investigative reporters, other villains, society, his cronies and others may all want to extract justice in their own way.

“Sometimes, if you’re lucky, a villain will just come to you whole … I love when your subconscious does the work for you … you have a real, heinous person in mind, either a criminal you’ve read about who sparks such an outrage in your soul that you have to create him on paper just to destroy him the way he needs to be destroyed. Sometimes it’s a person you really know – in the novella I recently finished I took great pleasure in detailing all the banal viciousness of a producer I know and then bashing his brainless head in.” From Alexandra Sokoloff's post 'What Makes a Great Villain'.

Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs

Stephen Tremp blogs at Breakthrough Blogs ..

shown here at a book signing

and is the author of NearFuture SciFi Thriller "Breakthrough"

Please check out Steve's Science for Youth tab, and his Library Blog tab

This blog, more likely its owner, is not sophisticated enough to have Tweets and Facebooks and buttons! .. but we'd love whatever you can do for Stephen!!

Thank you .. it's been great fun having you here .. and now I know a little about developing a villain for a story .. and I so look forward to your next home and away ..

Dear Mr Postman .. as you can see I really do have my first guest posting here .. and I feel so honoured to have this wonderful author .. my mother will look up at me with big eyes and say ... what? .. and how? and why? .. and all the other fun things and then she'll have one big smile for me .. ! But perhaps today .. I should say this is a villainous story?!

Hilary Melton-Butcher

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